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The Exhibited Documentary
The Current State of Documentary within Contemporary Art
Copyright 2016 by Morgane Brun
Acknowledgements
This thesis would not have been possible without the help of numerous people.
Firstly, I want to thank Eric de Bruyn, my research supervisor for his time and for sharing his knowledge.
Ilga Minjon, Tiphaine Brun and Cecile Margueritte deserve credit for helping with my research and make my knowledge and interest increase.
I would like to thank all those people that were directly involved in the production of the thesis; Impakt Festival, BAK Utrecht, Aernout Mik and Florian Wüst.
I would like also to thank André Crous, Tiphaine Brun, Petra Albu and Jacqueline Marino for endlessly rereading, reviewing, and editing my manuscript.
Abstract
Table of Contents
Introduction ... 5
Chapter I: The documentary genre within contemporary art and its origins ... 8
Introduction ... 8
Documentary: a Regime of Truth between Reality and Fiction ... 9
Documentary and Contemporary Art
...
13Documentary and Avant-Gardes ... 13
The Documentary Turn: the Contemporary Condition of Documentary Within Art ... 15
Conclusion ... 17
Chapter II: ‘Cardboard Walls’ by Aernout Mik, 2013, BAK, Utrecht, the
Netherlands ... 18
Introduction ... 18
Universality Versus Specificity
...
19What is Reenactment? ... 19
Reenactment: the Difficulty to Translate Testimonies of Traumatic Events ... 22
A Universal Memory ... 24
Art Versus Media
...
27Floating Images: a Poetic Reenactment ... 28
Emblematic Moments: the Media Reenactment ... 29
Mirrored Reenactment: a Spatial Mise-en-Abyme ... 31
Conclusion
...
33Chapter III: ‘Crude Economy’ film program curated by Florian Wüst for Impakt
Festival, Utrecht, the Netherlands, November 2013 ... 34
Introduction ... 34
Film Program as Work of Art ... 35
Definition and Origins ... 35
The Curator Artist ... 37
A Paradoxically Peculiar Setting ... 38
Re-making Film History ... 39
A Chronological Approach ... 39
A Space of Dissenssion ... 41
Changing Status ... 44
Conclusion ... 46
Conclusion ... 47
Bibliography ... 48
The Exhibited Documentary - the Current State of Documentary
within Contemporary Art
Introduction
My interest in the place of the documentary form within contemporary art first took hold in 2013, during my internship at Impakt1 in Utrecht. Over a period of six months, I helped to work on and expand the different film programs of the organization’s festival, and I had the opportunity to tackle the abundance of film and video works adopting a documentary approach. During my internship, I had access to archival and new material that enabled me to observe the popularity of the documentary form in the arts sphere over the past two decades. Today, this approach is playing an important role, especially in contemporary art, and there is an unmistakable need to describe and discuss the current progress of the documentary form.
Nevertheless, given the currency of this subject, it may appear difficult, or even impossible, to seize the entire scope of this field in its full diversity and complexity. The goal of this study is not, however, to enumerate the different uses made of the documentary genre in contemporary art at present. Instead, this research focuses on a few different practices that offer new aesthetic and social possibilities to the documentary form within contemporary art. This study seeks to examine the use of the documentary form in recent artworks, which entails a reflexive approach that differs from the formal structures of the documentary in the art system.
Artists, critics and scholars have invariably questioned the nature of the documentary and some have judged it to be incompatible with art by arguing that the documentary is a “transparent reflection of the world, in which subjectivity, creativity and expression [are] necessarily suppressed” (Stallabrass, 2013, 13). Trinh T. Minh-ha suggests that “the fathers of documentary initially insisted that documentary is not News, but Art (a ‘new and vital art form’, as Grierson once proclaimed): that its essence is not information (as with ‘the hundreds of tweedledum “industrials” or worker-education films’); not reportage, not newsreels; but something close to ‘a creative
1 Impakt is a cultural organization that has existed since 1988 and focuses on critical and creative views on
treatment of actuality’ (Grierson’s renowned definition)” (Stallabrass, 2013, 72). In other words, and for the purpose of this study, we can consider documentary as aesthetically reflecting on the status of a document instead of only being a document. On this basis, the present study will first examine the development of the regime of truth in the film medium, as well as art history, by looking at concepts discussed by scholars such as Bill Nichols’s documentary modes and André Bazin’s Myth of total cinema. Furthermore, by establishing a relation between the documentary form and that of artistic avant-garde works, this study will determine how the documentary form has developed inside contemporary art. More specifically, this research will pay particular attention to the tendency of the documentary turn that has operated in contemporary art for the past two decades and has been fundamental to the current state of the documentary. In order to do so, this study will be basing its research on the writings of Hito Steyerl and Maria Lind as well as those of Clement Greensberg, all of whom have researched and published on the subject extensively.
The research will then focus on two case studies that are representative of certain documentary approaches and strategies currently used within contemporary artworks that incorporate the medium of film. Even though the choice of these approaches forces us not to consider certain other strategies, such as the film essay, it makes it possible for us to focus on two important developments of the documentary form through the film medium within contemporary art.
The second case study is the film program “Crude Economy,” which Florian Wüst curated for the Impakt Festival 2013. A film program is a collage of several films around the same theme (it could be the same director, the same period, the same subject, etc.) originating in different forms, be it fictional or non-fictional, made for cinematic screening or as an advertisement. This research will examine the evolution of the status of the curator, considered as an artist and consequently given the possibility to offer, via his or her curation of a film program, a platform to develop the potential of the documentary form. “Crude Economy” provides an overview of the challenge that such practice also entails, still little known by the general public. Through this example, the research will analyze the relationship that the documentary form has with history and how this relation creates what Rancière calls a space of dissension, in which the esthetic and political aspects of the documentary form question the organization of social order.
Through those two case studies, the research brings together concepts from different fields, including film history, film theory, art history and philosophy, in order to grasp the impact of the documentary genre in contemporary art.
The Exhibited Documentary - the Current State of Documentary
within Contemporary Art
Chapter I: The documentary genre within contemporary art and its
origins
Introduction
“Documentary” is a complex term that has been defined in many different ways, but it is generally acknowledged that the pioneering documentary filmmaker John Grierson was the first to employ the term.2 According to him, the documentary form is “a creative treatment of actuality” (1966, 147) meaning that documentary is an original approach of one’s reality. This vague notion nevertheless permeates the main debates concerning the documentary genre. An exploration of the various definitions of this term will help to grasp the role and influence of the genre within contemporary art. To this end, I will first examine the status of truth, which has accompanied the genre throughout the many evolutions of the film medium and its relationship to contemporary art. Subsequently, I will examine the place that documentary films have occupied within contemporary art by analyzing its relationship with the avant-garde. Finally, I will consider the recent evolution of the form by looking at what has been termed the “recent documentary turn.”3
The term “documentary” comes from the Latin word documentum, which means document or proof. Using the dictionary definition, it is generally agreed that a documentary is “based on real events, places or circumstances and usually intended primarily to record or inform.”4 The documentary genre has developed along with the
2 In his written work, John Grierson applied the word “documentary” to a film for the first time in his
criticism of Robert Flaherty’s “Moana” (1926) in the newspaper The New York Sun (Feb., 8th 1926) in order
to acknowledge its “documentary value.”
3Several publications have been dealing with the “documentary turn.” Among them Archive Fever: Uses of
the Document in Contemporary Art (2008) edited by Okwui Enzwezor, who was the artistic director of the exhibition ‘Documenta 11’in 2002 and who is a of the documentary turn tendency. Others example are Documentary Now: Contemporary Strategies in Photography, Film, and the Visual Arts, edited by Frits Gierstberg (2006) and The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Document and Contemporary Art #1, edited by Hito Steyerl (one of the prominent artist of this tendency) and Maria Lind (2008).
media of film and photography, generating a form that has as its main purpose to document reality through technically reproduced images. Theorists, critics and artists have discussed the ambitious nature of the documentary since the first time it was acknowledged at the end of the 1920s such as Walter Benjamin, Bill Nichols, Ursula Biemann, Harun Farucki, Susan Sontag, Carl Patinga and many others.5 Nevertheless, the question remains today: What is, and what is not a documentary?
1. Documentary: a Regime of Truth Between Fiction and Reality
If we have a look at film history, a dichotomy is often appliedwithin film history between the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès, 6 (James Monaco, 2000, 285) with each exemplifying one the two different traditions of representation, namely the desire to document events of day-to-day life and the will to present fictional stories, respectively. This conventional dichotomy has often led to an opposition between documentary and fiction. However, the distinction between those two traditions is more complex. Carl Plantinga, contributor of “Documentary” edited by Julian Stallabrass (2013) and professor of media studies at Calvin College, defines the documentary by suggesting that “although the distinction between non-fiction film and documentary cannot bear much theoretical weight, it might be useful to think of the documentary as a subset of non-fiction films, characterized by more aesthetic, social, rhetorical and/or political ambitions than, say, a corporate or instructional film”(2003, 52). That is to say that rather than being the opposite of fiction, documentary films could be considered part of non-fiction films. Nevertheless, unlike other non-fiction films, documentary is the form whose borders with fiction are the most porous. Indeed, fiction and documentary films can have similarities in their aesthetics and narratives. For example, the Taviani brothers’ 2012 feature film “Caesar Must Die” (Cesare deve morire) brings together fiction and documentary assets by filming actual prisoners enacting William Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar” in their own environment, the Rebibbia prison in Italy. This film illustrates the difficulty of drawing a clear limit between fictional and documentary form. The documentary format possesses, through its nature of technical
5Those authors and artists have all reflected upon the characteristics of documentary, its essence, at
different periods of art and film history.
6This dichotomy has been earlier described by the filmmaker René Clair in his book “Cinéma Yesterday and
reproduction, a certain deal of mise-en-scène. The aesthetic and narrative choices that the artist or the director makes encourage a re-assessment of the truthfulness of a work that uses a documentary approach. In the same way, some hybrid forms of documentary merge with fiction, such as the docu-fiction.
Because the debate on the nature of the documentary has shifted over time, scholars have continually had to question the truthfulness of the image and its relation to reality. These inquiries have been linked to the history of documentary in film and photography. In the 1930s, several approaches to the reality of the image were developed. At the time, which is also the period corresponding with Grierson’s first use of the term “documentary,” the film theorist Siegfried Kracauer presented an approach of reality within the film medium. He suggested, “Aside from the fact that the documentaries do not explore the world to the full, they differ strongly in their behavior toward physical reality. To be sure, part of them manifest sincere concern for nature in raw, carrying messages which palpably emanate from the camera work, their imaginary” (1997, 201). Kracauer’s idea of the representation of reality differs from the ones of Benjamin and Brecht (discussed below) by suggesting that the film medium, and more specifically documentary films, denies the possibility to mechanically represent the world as it is because of the intervention of the imaginary through the use of the camera. Kracauer considers there to be two types of documentary: one with a cinematic approach and one indifferent to it. While the first category poses the problem of the intervention of the imaginary through aesthetics, the second one is presented as ”reportage pure and simple” that weakens the emotional involvement of the viewers.
following the ideas of Bertolt Brecht,7 this fascination for a naturalistic and realist mode of representing reality should be put in perspective in order to shatter the illusion of reality. One could associate this idea with Soviet avant-garde films that utilized montage to stimulate viewers. For example, Dziga Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera” (Chelovek s kinoapparatom) (1929) presents images of the making of the film: the editor preparing the cuts and the camera filming. One may see this mise-en-abyme as a tool to represent reality, as the lived world, while revealing the filmic apparatus to counter the illusion of the representation.
However, one might argue that montage, as developed by the Soviet avant-garde filmmakers such as Lev Kuleshov and Vsevolod Pudovkin, also helps to create a cinematic illusion. This idea was further explored by André Bazin in the 1950s when he called the use of montage as a means to achieve realism the “myth of total cinema.” (1967, 23-27) According to Bazin, not only editing but also technical developments such as sound and color contribute to a more realistic representation of the physiological viewing process: “The guiding myth, then, inspiring the invention of cinema, is the accomplishment of that which dominated in a more or less fashion all techniques of the mechanical representation of reality in the nineteenth century, from photography to the phonograph, namely an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time” (2005, 21). A good example of the implementation of his thoughts can be observed in the documentary films made by the Direct Cinema movement in the 1960s. By using a hand-held camera strategy, made possible by the technological progress of this period, the filmmakers of Direct Cinema strived to capture reality as truthfully as possible: “the filmmaker was always a participant-witness and an active fabricator of meaning, a producer of cinematic discourse rather than a neutral or all-knowing reporter of the way things truly are” (Nichols, 1983, 248). Bazin goes even farther in his reflection by suggesting that “every film is a social documentary” in the sense that it documents the aspirations of the collective unconsciousness.
In the 1970s, the regime of truth of the image shifts again, a shift that one may ascribe to the development of mass media television. Susan Sontag describes this phenomenon by suggesting that “needing to have reality confirmed and experience
7 The German playwright Bertold Brecht framed in the 1930 the concept of the distancing effect in
enhanced by photographs is an aesthetics consumerism to which everyone is now addicted” (1979, 80). According to her, the images have become the commonly understood reality: “Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality, and of realism” (1979, 87). That is to say that the masses rely on mechanically recorded images in a different way than they used to. Indeed, with the arrival of television in households, access to images has become common and changed the connection with the viewer who now has daily access to the outside world by means of those mass-mediated images. She develops her reasoning by stating that “the primitive notion of the efficacy of images presumes that images possess the quality of real things, but our inclination is to attribute to real things the quality of an image” (1979, 158). In other words, the authenticity of things is determined by the masses that rely on images to define it. To raise the issue that could engender this evolution, Linda Williams has quoted Anton Kaes: "[T]he sheer mass of historical images transmitted by today's media weakens the link between public memory and personal experience." (1993, 310) Indeed, according to Kaes, the danger of the mass images is to not relate the past either to experience or history (personal or public) but to media driven images, and, in that sense, to make a selective recollection of the past.
This concern regarding the shift in the regime of the truth of images resulted in the 1990s in a renewal in the documentary form via what has been called by Williams the New Documentary.8 By embracing the reflexivity contained within this genre through this questioning of the truthfulness of the mechanically produced image, the documentary has evolved into a form that expands the possibilities of depiction. According to Williams, those possibilities lie in the potential self-reflexive character of the documentary film: “In the discussions surrounding the truth claims of many contemporary documentaries, attention has centered upon the self-reflexive challenge to once hallowed techniques of vérité. It has become an axiom of the New Documentary that films cannot reveal the truth of events, but only the ideologies and consciousness that construct competing truths—the fictional master narratives by which we make sense of events” (1993, 315). That is to say that audiences have become aware of the complex relation that images have with truth, and they challenge their claims.
This shift has not only been only happened within cinema but also changed the perception of the documentary form by artists and photographers, as well as critics. Moreover, it has expanded the different forms and strategies of the documentary genre.
8 Williams, Linda. "Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History and the New Documentary." Film Quarterly,
Nichols has described the self reflexive character of documentary as a specific documentary mode: “the self-reflexive documentary addresses the limitations of assuming that subjectivity and both of the social and textual of the positioning of the self (as filmmaker or viewer) are ultimately not problematic” (1983, 262).9 This strategy can be found mainly within experimental documentary such as the work of Chris Marker in “Sans Soleil” (1984), in which a female narrator, who is also a fictional character, travels back in time through her memory by reading a letter a cameraman has sent her. In that sense, one can say that self-reflexive documentaries have permitted a certain emancipation of the documentary genre regarding the boundaries between reality and fiction.
The transformation of the regime of truth in images has also influenced the use of the film medium within art. Its evolution that can be traced through the theories of Walter Benjamin, André Bazin and later Linda Williams, indicates the uninterrupted re-assessment of its establishment that have led to the unfolding of the documentary approach within contemporary art.10
2. Documentary and Contemporary Art
Documentary and Avant-Gardes
The nature of the documentary and its relation to truthfulness have made people reluctant to consider it within the scope of art. However, art has been the privileged medium for the expansion of the documentary genre. The art historian Olivier Lugon has noted “‘Documentary’ is often taken as the antonym to ‘artistic’, yet it stems primarily from the artistic field – beyond art, yet very much a part of it” (Steyerl and Lind, 2008, 35). According to him, the documentary genre has been given a self-reflexive and a political purpose within art: “to reform art and society simultaneously, to purify photographic and cinematic aesthetics, while at the same time helping to improve the world” (Steyerl and Lind, 2008, 35). Since an attempt to capture the entire evolution of the documentary genre within art would be a tedious initiative, it might be better to focus on the strategies that the documentary genre has used to meet those ambitions.
9 According to Nichols, six forms of documentary exist: the poetic, expository, observational, reflexive and
performative modes.
10 One may define the documentary approach as an approach using of documentary images within a form
The progress of the documentary genre within art has been most noticeable during the avant-garde periods, which embodied a character of profound change both in art and society. Hito Steyerl and Maria Lind have noted in that respect that documentaries’ “inclusion into the art field historically marks a moment of social and political crisis, as was the case with the early years of Soviet communism with its debates about productivism and factography, the Great Depression of the 1930s in the US and reformist documentary photography, anti-colonial movements and the birth of the film essay, the counter-hegemonial movements of the 1960s and ’70s, and nouvelle vague documentary as well as conceptualist documentation” (2008, 12). Those periods of crisis during which avant-garde films have flourished have been moments in art history during which the status of documentary has been reconsidered. Because of the proximity of avant-garde and documentary, one can grasp how the documentary genre has evolved within contemporary art by observing the influence of the avant-garde movements.
According to Nichols, the avant-garde of the 1920s contributed to the establishment of documentary aesthetics: “It is this milieu, with its own formal conventions and social purpose, its own amalgam of advocates and practitioners, institutions and discourses, and its own array of assumptions and expectations on the part of audience and artists that provides both representational techniques and a social context conducive to a documentary movement” (2001, 591). In other words, by challenging the image and its regime of truth, avant-garde artists have helped to introduce the documentary genre within art. For instance, the artists of the Soviet avant-garde, such as Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, explored, with a political purpose, the use of editing associated with documentary images. While speaking of Vertov’s film “Man with a Movie Camera” (Chelovek s kinoapparatom) (1929), Peter Wollen stated that “it can be seen as a precursor of both cinema-vérité and of structural film, though also, evidently, a sign of its ambiguity, of its uncertainty caught between an ideology of a photographic realism and one of formal innovation and experiment” (1976, 81). Wollen presented Vertov’s film as the precursor of cinema-vérité and structural film and established a link between art and documentary and at the same time exposed one the main critic that will face documentary within art, which is to say its ambiguity towards fiction.
The arrival of television in the household at that point in time came to symbolize the overconsumption of images, serving as entertainment but not engaging with the audience on an intellectual level. This change of the images’ status has evoked criticism among artists. Some, like Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell, started to use this new audiovisual medium to produce installations and performances. A new art form appeared and came to be known as video art. This is the context in which the documentary genre began to establish itself in contemporary art. Its connection to reality gave it a socio-political dimension that artists use in order to develop ideas through their works, and it gave them an alternative to the mass media and to what they considered – at least, at the time – institutional art. Thus, the documentary underwent a new evolution within art. Deirdre Boyle, who has written several essays about American documentary video art in this period, explains its complex relationship between video artists and political activism by suggesting that “there were a few distinctions between video artists and activists, and nearly everyone made documentary tapes” (1990, 51). This period gave a fresh impetus to the use of documentary within art. Nevertheless, the medium needed to assert itself aesthetically before reemerging in the 1990s in a new development that has been dubbed “the documentary turn”.
The Documentary Turn: the Contemporary Condition of Documentary within Art
In the late 1980s, video artists embraced the ongoing technical advances and started to use digital images. This development enabled them to increase the aesthetic possibilities of self-reflexive films. Because of the growing popularity of video installations, artists started to use digital projectors to create new spatial environments in which videos could be adapted to all shapes and sizes. This advancement in technology provided art with new means of expression and led to an aesthetic renewal.11
This tendency has notably been illustrated by the exhibition Documenta X, which Catherine David curated and took place in Kassel, Germany, in 1997. The influential exhibition attracted several scholars and theorists, who in the framework of the 100 days, 100 guests program spoke about the status of art at that time. Their discussions were compiled into Politics/Poetics, which David edited and is, in the contemporary art
11 The technologic advancement is not the only factor that has permitted an evolution of the form of the medium.
field, widely considered to be an influential collection of thoughts on the topic. With this exhibition, David sought to raise questions about the implication of art, and more specifically art works using the documentary approach, within the social and political critique. Indeed, many artists that use video presented works in the exhibition, including Chris Marker and Harun Farocki which evinced an unmistakable consciousness of the political world in which those artists lived by adopting a documentary approach. David’s approach to Documenta X permitted a re-acknowledgment of the position of the documentary in contemporary art but also contributed to opening debate on the role of the socio-politic critique within this new documentary approach adopted by video artists. This new development has also raised questions on the nature of documentary and its status within art, and consequently has raised interest among art galleries and museums, which have become the distribution platforms of the documentary turn. To understand this development within contemporary art, we need to observe the status that artists gave to the documentary approach at this time.
In his article “Moving Images of Globalization”, T.J. talks about “the uncertain interval between aesthetics and political commitment” (2003, 8) in which contemporary video artists using a documentary approach are operating. In this argument, he asserts that the status of the documentary continues to be precarious, despite its consistently growing popularity. Because of the documentary genre’s ambiguous relationship with contemporary art that I have previously discussed in this chapter, but also because of the social and political climate in which the world is evolving, which has important consequences for the role and status of art exhibition spaces and institutions, the place of the documentary within film and new media is still being debated. In the introduction to their book Green Room (2008), Hito Steyerl and Maria Lind refer to the theorist Vít Havránek, who connects the contemporary interest in the documentary in the art world to the response to the need of “total organization of the reality after 1989” in Eastern Europe. Beyond Eastern Europe, the entire world has been affected by the fall of communism and the globalization of the capitalist economic system. Further, the enhancement of the Internet over the past few decades and the growing popularity of social media networks (e.g. YouTube or Facebook), as well as their fast speed, has made individuals feel increasingly like a citizen of the world, which makes us grapple with social but also political issues from other parts of the world.
ethical preoccupations of modern day society that have been projected within contemporary art. In that sense, the documentary turn has been one of the undeniable influences of the evolution of the use of documentary within contemporary art.
Conclusion
The Exhibited Documentary - the Current State of Documentary
within Contemporary Art
Chapter II: ‘Cardboard Walls’ by Aernout Mik, 2013, BAK, Utrecht, the
Netherlands
Introduction
artist adopting a documentary approach in some of his work.12 In this regard, “Cardboard Walls” may be observed as an example of the use of a documentary approach in the work of video artists and therefore reflects on the current state and influence of documentary genre within the art context. Indeed, one may consider Mik’s installation as an illustration of how contemporary video artists questioned the conventions of the documentary form. In order to do so, I will expose the several dichotomies at work in “Cardboard Walls,” including universality specificity, art and mass media, and non-fiction and fiction. First, I will examine how Mik uses the documentary approach to deal with the specificity of a peculiar event combined with the universal character of a work of art. Then, I will examine how “Cardboard Walls” uses the dichotomy of art and mass media to engage with another dichotomy, namely fiction and non-fiction. By looking closely at these different dichotomies at play in this specific work, I will seek to determine the role of the documentary genre within contemporary art at present. Indeed, as society is evolving, art evolves with it and proposes new aesthetic channels and strategies to represent the world. “Cardboard Walls” is a concrete example of the issues that the evolution of the documentary genre has produced within contemporary art in the past two decades. What are the limits of the use of the documentary approach in contemporary art, and what are the questions that it raises? In other words, how can one use “Cardboard Walls” to define the status of documentary approach in contemporary art today?
1.
Universality versus Specificity
What is a reenactment?
The “Cardboard Walls” installation deals with a singular event, namely the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The concept of an event has been philosophically debated,
12 In the previous chapter I have discussed the documentary turn as one of the tendencies that have
but for the purpose of our analysis, we might look toward a narrative approach. Gerald Prince’s Dictionary of Narratology defines an event as “a change of state manifested in discourse by a process statement in the mode of do or happen. An event can be an action or act or a happening” (2003, 1972). In the case of Fukushima, the event has historical importance because it belongs to the category of disaster. Disasters can be accidental, natural or premeditated, and they not only affect a large amount of lives directly but also lead to consequences in the future. In “Cardboard Walls,” Mik deals with the aftermath of a disaster that happened less than two years prior to his creation of the piece. The temporal proximity between the installation and the event that it represents, creates a dichotomy between the singularity of the event, as well as an approach more universal of the notion of disaster, and how art can represent this event. The use of reenactment here facilitates a reflection on the different questions that the dichotomy raises, and it places the work within a time-related opposition between the specific and universal conceptions of a historical event. Indeed, the viewers’s memory of media images from this specific event are much more recent and in that sense easier to reminisce, making the understanding of the images of “Cardboard Walls” more accessible. On the other hand, the issue raised in the piece relates to broader questions, such as the question of trauma and memory that I will develop later in this chapter, which can be apply to any disaster.
Mik’s installation consists of a two-channel video projected onto two screens in the middle of an exhibition room. This 50-minute video recreates the living conditions of the Fukushima refugees in their camp after the disaster. The performance is delivered in part by professional Japanese actors but mainly by Fukushima refugees who reenact their own experience of the nuclear accident and its aftermath. By doing so, “Cardboard Walls” produces a reenactment of a specific set of happenings. The practice of reenactment uses both fiction and realityand has been employed in both fiction and documentary films for various reasons. In essence, this strategy consists of the recreation of a specific event from the past. 13 Within the film medium, a reenactment can assume different forms. For instance, it can be the recreation of a specific event by actors, but it may also include, only or partly, real participants in the original event. At present, reenactments are used mainly to depict an event that was not documented on film. The use of the reenactment strategy in “Cardboard Walls” does not adopt this function. Indeed, the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster has been widely documented, televised and broadcasted in other formats by mass media. By using both
actors and people who experienced the actual event, “Cardboard Walls” establishes a reflexive approach to the event’s past and continuing representation. A reenactment emphasizes this reflexive dimension by becoming a means to comprehend how the truth-value of a representation is generated by the film medium. Moreover, a reenactment poses a number of questions concerning the experience of temporality. This peculiar strategy grants an experimental and sensual dimension to the concept of cinematic recreation by merging past and present within the same representation. In this sense, Bill Nichols has noted that “[reenactments] resurrect a sense of a previous moment that is now seen through a fold that incorporates the embodied perspective of the filmmaker and the emotional investment of the viewer.” (2008, 172) Indeed, in “Cardboard Walls,” viewers perceive the Fukushima disaster in a different manner than is the case through the image provided by the mass media, because they witness the witnesses and see the past brought into the present.
Mik uses the device of reenactment in his different works in a very specific manner. His staging refers to current events without mentioning them explicitly. He states in a filmed interview “all of my pieces relate to a kind of political social event, but they’re not directly images of it. There’s a short moment, a sort of flash, that brings images that you recognize but can’t really place.”14 By way of example, his previous work, “Communitas” (2010), was filmed in Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science, a building that has a strong connection to the communist past of Poland, because it was conceived as a gift from Stalin to the Polish people. For this particular piece, Mik filmed actors staging an attempt to create a utopian political organization. In “Communitas”, like in many of Mik’s works, the artist has created a certain ambiguity between historical moments and fiction. The degree of ambiguity is even greater in “Cardboard Walls” due to the recreation of a specific historical moment. Indeed, the video installation clearly portrays the re-organized life of the Fukushima refugees within a warehouse involving genuine evacuees. In this improvised camp, groups of people and families have built their private spaces from cardboard. The life is so well organized that we can distinguish pathways between the blocks of cardboard, which have been arranged to provide the feeling of a real habitation space that even includes doors. “Cardboard Walls” replicates how the Japanese camps were shown in mass media reports.15 In that sense, the installation challenges the device of reenactment as being the recreation of a specific event though the media images or through the memory of the refugees themselves.
14 Aernout Mik – Communitas." Video file. Stedelijk Museum. Posted May 23, 2013.
https://vimeo.com/66799042.
Reenactment: the difficulty to translate different testimonies of a traumatic event
In order to depict this specific event, Mik recreates different emblematic moments that occurred while Fukushima’s refugees occupied their temporary camps in 2011. For instance, “Cardboard Walls” presents the visit of the TEPCO (The Tokyo Electricity Power Company) staff that arrived at the camps after the nuclear disaster in order to apologize to the victims.16 During the creation of the piece, Mik faced many difficulties by having the victims of the Fukushima catastrophe relive their experience of the traumatic event: “Originally, I wanted the roles of TEPCO to be played by the general group of participants, both former evacuees and others. But it turned out in the preparation of the work that these roles were so emotionally loaded and controversial that it was wiser to prepare this differently.”17 This perspective makes clear how reenactment establishes a complex relation to traumatic events. A trauma is the result of a specific event that one has not been able to process in the form of an emotional response. Victims of traumatic events relive the same experience repeatedly without being able to detach themselves from it. For instance, soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) face difficulties dissociating the present from the past, and they often believe they are still in a hostile environment. Professor Cathy Caruth reports in her book Trauma, Exploration in Memory that Freud, in his early writing on trauma, noted that “the possibility of integrating the lost event into a series of associative memories, as part of the cure, was seen precisely as a way to permit the event to be forgotten” (1995, vii). In other words, making the victim remember the traumatic event would help him or her overcome it. Reenactment has been used to this end in psychotherapy.18
However, this psychoanalytic dimension is absent from “Cardboard Walls.” The performative aspect of the reenactment in the art context provides a testimonial dimension instead of a cure. In this regard, Nichols notes that “no one is compelled to act out the original pain and trauma. Nor does the reenactment facilitate the work of mourning the past as much as the process of reclaiming it” (2008, 80). In other words, it is impossible to accurately recreate, by means of a filmic representation, the original
16 Figures 4.3 and 6
17 Aernout Mik, e-mail message to the author, October 15th, 2014.
18 In her article “Einmal ist keimal” Observations on Reenactment,Jennifer Allen makes this connection
pain caused by a traumatic event, and a reenactment does not enable the participants to overcome their own trauma. Rather, reenactment participates in the testimony process. In “Cardboard Walls,” reenactment serves this function of testimony by involving participants who are directly associated with the traumatic event that is depicted. It is through the memories of the participants that Mik builds the performance within the video. Contrary to his previous works, in “Cardboard Walls” he could not avoid being confronted with concrete memories due to the focus on a specific event: “For this piece it did not feel proper to exclude the real memory and experience from the reconstruction of this traumatic event. In many other works, I ‘re-enact’ an imaginary memory, relating to collective memory, compiled from an accumulation of memories, desires, fears and projections. In this case, the memory was real and concrete.”19 In this statement, Mik acknowledges the singularity of “Cardboard Walls” within his own body of work. The piece has the particularity of dealing with one specific and concrete event, and thus, it is the first time he has included individual memory in one of his works. This choice permits a questioning of the relationship between individual and collective memory and their representation by the medium of film. This questioning is emphasized by the lack of sound that characterizes Mik’s work in general and is also present in “Cardboard Walls.”
Yet, this absence of sound also presents a problem. The voice is of undeniable importance to any testimony. Consider, for instance, the following statement by Shoshana Felman, who has written about the significance of the voice in the documentary Shoah by Claude Lanzmann (1985): “To testify is thus not merely to narrate but to commit oneself, and to commit the narrative, to others: to take responsibility -- in speech -- for history or for the truth of an occurrence, for something which, by definition, goes beyond the personal, in having general (nonpersonal) validity and consequences”(1992, 204). That is to say, for victims of a traumatic event, testimony is not only a manner in which to verbalize their experience but also to testify — for themselves and for the other victims that are not able to do so. In that sense, they verbally take responsibility for the truthfulness of their story. Therefore, the lack of direct speech in “Cardboard Walls” could be considered detrimental to Felman’s question of responsibility, because without voices it does not seem like the testimony is coming directly from the victims, which prevents a concrete verbalization of the their experience. Without this verbalization, the viewer does not have the possibility of being fully aware of the trauma that was caused. Instead, the viewer merely interprets the images. The viewer of “Cardboard Walls” is deprived of direct access to the testimony of
the Fukushima refugee, which is only accessible through speech. Furthermore, the use of the reenactment strategy in “Cardboard Walls” calls upon the relation that this medium has with testimony. Felman has noted that “Because the testimony is unique and irreplaceable, the film is an exploration of the differences between heterogeneous points of view, between testimonial stances which can be assimilated into, not subsumed by, one another” (1992, 207). In other words, Felman states that Shoah allows the union of different testimonies of the same event without creating a version of the event that is singular in meaning. Applied to “Cardboard Walls,” this reasoning implies that the testimony of the participating refugees’ cannot be the same as those of the Japanese actors in the piece because of their different emotional implication. As the refugees are reliving something that happened to them, the actors based their memory on what they have been told by different sources, including the local and international media. Through his mise-en-scene, Mik’s explored those different testimonies and by doing so gives his own experienced of the event. Indeed, his character of observer remind the viewers of their own memories of the event, which for most of them have been created through the images of different mass media (television, internet, radio, press…) Yet, one may question how those different testimonies and memories can be dissociated without the medium of speech.
A universal memory: history
In “Cardboard Walls,” Mik chooses to include both collective and individual memory. Without sound, there is no discernible distinction between these different types of memory. Thus, the specificity of the event itself is challenged. In other words, the conflation of those different levels of memory, emphasized by the lack of sound that prevents them from being distinct, creates a universalization of the piece. By convoking individual and collective memory, “Cardboard Walls” blurs its temporal specificity. This particular characteristic of the work reinforces a common understanding of the timeless aspect of the work of art that the art historian Erwin Panofsky has described as the absolutism of art.20 This aspect is at work in “Cardboard Walls,” whose video loop prevents the viewer from establishing a concrete chronology and defining the beginning
20 “Therefore an artistic phenomenon, if it is to be fully understood in its uniqueness, makes a twofold claim:
and the end of the video. Small, soundless events are strung together without any temporal indicators.
By contrast, this atemporal aspect of art is counterbalanced by the role that art plays within history. The scholar Peter Osborne, who has written about time in artistic practice, has noted “Contemporary works are being understood and valorized as artefacts of remembrance, while remembrance is reduced to, or identified with, memory or recollection, and linked to testimony” (2013, 190). In other words, contemporary art works are connected to their time periods. According to Osborne, this phenomenon presents the issue of looking at the historical present only from an artistic point of view. By doing so, present history can only be identified by its distance or separation from the past, through art. Nonetheless, is cultural memory alone in the construction of history today? Historians and philosophers have also questioned the relationship between memory and history in this current debate. 21 Most of them acknowledge that memory and history have many similarities. However, they agree that the two concepts are different from each other. For instance, the scholar David Lowenthal defines the differences between history and memory by observing that “history differs from memory not only in how knowledge of the past is acquired and validated, but also in how it is transmitted, preserved and altered” (1985, 212). Yet, the current importance given to the debate between history and memory originates from the re-assessment of the authority of history in the 1980s through the impulse of post-modernism. Resurrecting the idea that the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard developed in his writings about the postmodern condition, Jan Verwoert notes: “all the grand paradigms we had at our disposal to tell history as a coherent narrative have been discredited and hence rendered useless” (Caronia, 2014, 29).22 In other words, the narratives used by conventional history have been criticized and disputed over time. As a result, the concepts of cultural and collective memory have been seen as an alternative to history. The historian Alon Confino, echoing Osborne’s critique of contemporary art works becoming objects of remembrance, writes that “the concept of ‘culture’ has become for historians a compass of a sort that governs questions of interpretation, explanation and method. And the notion of ‘memory’ has taken its place now as a
21 The philosopher George Santayana has argued that “History is nothing but assisted and recorded
memory” (1954, 394). But he is not only the only one which have discussed the relationship between memory and history. This is also the case of the historians Frances A. Yates and Wulf Kansteiner, as well as the art historian Liza Saltzman, among many others.
22 Lyotard, Jean-François, La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir, Les Éditions de Minuit (Paris:
leading term, recently perhaps the leading term, in cultural history” (1997, 1386). The evolution of the role of memory in cultural history is emphasized by the urgency that characterizes our current experience of time, which results from the accelerated processing of information and events in a globalized economy. In this context, contemporary works of art develop an alternative to conventional history. This is the case of “Cardboard Walls,” in which the characters reenact their past by means of improvisation, which as the performance progresses becomes “more speculative and propositional” owing to the combination of individual and collective memories. Nevertheless, the piece does not correspond to Osborne’s description of works of art as objects of remembrance, nor to conventional history, because according to Mik, the question of memory is central to “Cardboard Walls.” Mik says he sought “to combine personal and collective memory in the piece, therefore I worked with former evacuees in combination with other local people and even some people from outside of this region. [The purpose was] to let these two levels of memory interact with each other.”23 Hence, Mik allows the participants’ memory to merge with the collective memory of the event, which had already been circulated, mainly through the media.
Other artists working in the same medium as Mik have also raised this question of memory. Omer Fast’s “Spielberg’s List”(2003) and Pierre Huyghe’s “The Third Memory”(1999), for instance, are both two-channel video installations that analyze analogies between memory and Hollywood film storytelling. Fast interrogates the memories of Holocaust survivors after they have reenacted their own roles in Steven Spielberg’s film, “Schindler’s List”(1993). Whereas Huyghe reenacted the hold-up of a bank that occurred in 1972, with its protagonists, after it had been fictionalized in “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), one of the most acclaimed films of director Sidney Lumet. In both art pieces, it appears that the characters’ memories have been influenced by the power of media culture and confused by the story the films have recreated by using their own. In contrast with those two works, “Cardboard Walls” does not analyze the functioning of memory or its truth-value. Rather, it creates another type of memory: a fictional one that emerges from this interaction. “Through a combination of scripted actions and collective improvisation memories, fears, hopes and desires related to the traumatic event are being touched upon, and are invited to evolve to another level. […] Besides the attempts of the participants to reconstruct the scenes of their memories (either parts of their personal or collective memory), they also start to create scenes with the TEPCO people which they could have imagined or wished to have taken place”,
states the description of the work provided by the gallery that represents and distributes Mik’s work.24 “Cardboard Walls” embraces another regime of truth that allows fiction to intervene in memory and blur the boundaries between individual and collective memory. Mik does not confront the participants with their own memories but through improvisation enables them to go beyond the memories and construct their own history. For example, in one of the scenes in “Cardboard Walls,” a child plays with dolls that are wearing TEPCO uniforms.25 While she is trying to make them mimic the team by changing the dolls’ positions, one of the TEPCO members appears and helps her. Because of its metaphoric form, one may presume that the episode represented here is not the reenactment of an actual event. Indeed, it is very doubtful that one of the TEPCO team members helped a child refugee to play with dolls dressed like him. Moreover, as this event has not been documented and broadcasted, one cannot identify it as part of collective memory. It cannot be presented as part of an individual memory either, as the lack of direct testimony prevents it from being established as such. “Cardboard Walls” does not intend to elicit in the viewer an impression of historical accuracy. The alternative history that this work creates by engaging with memory permits a reconsideration of the role of collective memory and how the mass media represent it. The main issue that Mik’s installation raises is how contemporary art might reflect on the complexity of memory in the age of mass media.
2.
Art Versus Media
Mass media and their importance in our current society undeniably influence the construction of modern history. By using the representational strategy of reenactment that merges factual and fictional information, artists have tried to counter the hegemony of the images offered by media outlets. Jacques Rancière has noted that “the fiction of the aesthetic age defined models for connecting the presentation of facts and forms of intelligibility that blurred the border between the logic of facts and the logic of fiction. Moreover, historians and analysts of social reality adopted these models. Writing history and writing stories [fall] under the same regime of truth” (2009, 38-9). In other words, it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish fact from fiction in an aesthetic and a narrative sense, because they use the same form of narrativity. Even if fact and fiction
24 Figure 2.
have their own separate characteristics, each of them can utilize the other’s strategies in some contexts. For instance, reenactment is commonly used in documentary films, but it can also be used in a criminal investigation in order to reconstruct the facts, or by the mass media to recreate an event that was not filmed or photographed. In “Cardboard Walls,” the contrast between fact and fiction is difficult to discern, partly because of the lack of sound and the timeless feeling created as a result. However, two different types of narrative emerge within the video: One has a lyrical form that is commonly associated with works of art (i.e. a form closer to fiction), while the other is about the presentation of specific moments that relate to how events are broadcasted in the media (i.e. journalism as ‘just the facts and nothing but the facts’).
Floating images: the poetic reenactment
Mary Ann Doane has noted that televised mass media “has been conceptualized as the annihilation of memory, and consequently of history, in its continual stress upon the ‘nowness’ of its own discourse (Landy, 2001, 274). In other words, as mass media focuses predominantly on the actions happening in the present, neither memory nor history is taken into consideration. The narrativity of mass media is focused on the action, while “Cardboard Walls” seeks to distance itself from the event and explore the ways in which memory interacts with this event. The improvisation that Mik uses helps to create a contrast with the images that we have seen through the mass media. “Television’s time is a time which is, in effect, wholly determined” (Doane, 2005, 262), which is why improvisation does not apply to mass media coverage. But how does “Cardboard Walls” differentiate itself from the representation of the same event by the mass media? And what is the specific nature of the aesthetic narrative in “Cardboard Walls”?
has the impression that some takes are longer than others, even if it is not the case. By using this technique, the viewer perceives the camera as inhabiting a space or being in a position that is external to the scene. The camera acts as an external observer. The space becomes an important entity in which the participants are performing their everyday life without being disturbed by an outside force. In addition, the loop that the two-channel video performs emphasizes the ambiguous character of the video’s temporality and the oneiric character of the piece by making it timeless and beyond sensory reality. In a sense, this approach induces a loss of a perception of the specificity of the event as concrete and real, to renew it in a more universal perception, a timeless one. Doane has suggested that “The crisis compresses time and makes its limitations acutely felt. […] The catastrophe would from this perspective be the most critical of crises for its timing is that of the instantaneous, the moment, the punctual” (Landy, 2001, 270). The catastrophe is thus a unique moment in time and is represented as such by the media. By choosing to extend time in “Cardboard Walls,” Mik takes a stance contrary to that of the mass media.
Furthermore, the aesthetics of “Cardboard Walls” and the way in which it explores space and time serve to distance the viewer from the images of the event he or she has been exposed to by the mass media. The lack of sound emphasizes this effect by making the viewer focus only on the image and its aesthetics. Hence, the editing creates a rhythm within the images that helps to overcome the absence of sound and interpret what is given to see. Nevertheless, the ordinary actions in those scenes, such as reading, playing, sleeping, need to be counterbalanced by other images borrowed from the media coverage of the event in the collective memory of the viewer and help him or her identify the reenactment.
Emblematic moments: the media reenactment
instance, the participants recreate, through artistic representation, the tsunami that led to the Fukushima catastrophe. They create the impression of a wave movement by knocking over the cardboard houses one after the other. Because of its chronological incorrectness, some may find it disconcerting that Mik decided to include a visual metaphor for the tsunami. Indeed, this event is not part of the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster; on the contrary, it is the cause. The visual metaphor can be considered an anachronism, and the representation of such an emblematic event brings into question the representation that has already been made of this event. “Cardboard Walls,” which does not use any actual archival images, has a documentary approach that converts facts into fiction.
strategies. This implies the importance of documentary within contemporary art and its acknowledgment as a genre permitting art to deal with specific event as universal ones, such as the Fukushima disaster with extensive and universal consequences.
Mirrored reenactment: spatial mise-en-abyme
The artist uses a mirroring effect to stage the video in the exhibition space: Around these two screens on which the video work is projected, pieces of cardboard have been hung from the ceiling and form a maze. Inside the cardboard maze, chairs have been placed at random for the visitors. The cardboard has been placed in such a way that the screens are at eye level for those visitors who are seated. The installation reproduces the spatial structure of the video within its space and creates a mise en abyme of the strategy used in the video. By using the strategy of reenactment, Mik simultaneously creates another type of reenactment, related not to any performance but to the space itself. This strategy makes it possible not only to maintain the responsiveness of the spectators but also to reflect on the apparatus and its mode of representation.
Bertolt Brecht explored this distancing effect within the performing arts in the 1930s. According to him, spectators need to redefine their gaze toward what they are given to see and be removed from the position of observer. Spectators have to become active and involved but also be conscious of the apparatus to which they are exposed in order to comprehend what is playing out in front of their eyes.26 It is possible to perceive the space of “Cardboard Walls” as the materialized reflexive gap between the image and the spectator. Nevertheless, in contrast to the Brechtian distancing technique, the viewer of “Cardboard Walls” is not asked to be active or involved in the installation. The viewer is provided with very little information and seems to be given some freedom to interpret, which is not necessarily granted by the distancing effect. Indeed, Jacques Rancière has described the modern spectator as emancipated — one that influences and is influenced by the new forms of enunciation — within art, while he has criticized Brechtian theory for being as authoritarian as the classic theater it is revolting against. In his essay “The Emancipated Spectator” (1977), Rancière suggests that “to be reflexive is to structure a product in such a way that the audience assumes that the producer, the process of the making and the product are a coherent whole. Not only is an audience
26 “According to the Brechtian paradigm, theatrical mediation makes [spectators] conscious of the social
made aware of those relationships, but they are made to realize the necessity of it” (Rancière, 1977, 3). In other words, in order to give the viewer the opportunity to question a work of art, as well as its role and aim, it needs to be presented in such a way that everything in the apparatus has a precise purpose. In the case of “Cardboard Walls,” even though the viewer does not receive a great deal of information, the mise en abyme permits the viewer to be incorporated into the installation. Because the video is played in a loop, but also because the maze makes it possible to explore the space physically, the spectator is given the opportunity to understand and experience the installation in his or her own way.
The spatial arrangements begin even before the visitors enter the exhibition space. Pieces of cardboard welcome them as they enter the building. They hang from the ceiling, floating approximately 1 meter above the ground and guiding them from the ticket office to the exhibition space, but they also make access a physical challenge for the visitors. Moreover, viewers’ experience of the work will be different, depending on the moment they start watching the video, either beginning with one of the climactic moments or one of the floating moments. But can one consider the viewer of “Cardboard Walls” a Rancièrian or a Brechtian viewer? The Brechtian distancing technique cannot apply to this work, because the installation emphasizes instead of directly exposing its theatrical aspect. By contrast, because the viewer is placed in a spatial mise-en-abyme that recreates the environment of the video work of the installation, he or she is assumed to relate with the character of the video. For this reason, the viewer of Mik’s installation cannot be considered Rancièrian, either.
shape attitudes and assumptions. When documentaries are at their best, a sense of urgency brushes aside our effort to contemplate form or analyze rhetoric” (Preface, X, 1991). Even if one reads Nichols’s statement as bold and worthy of criticism, it resonates with regard to “Cardboard Walls.” Without any intention to evaluate the quality of the work, one can view the lack of social involvement as one evolution of the documentary approach within contemporary art. As a result, one may suggest that documentary evolves in the direction of a reflexive form in which the viewer is led toward emancipation.
Conclusion
Although Rancière has described the new complex relationship between spectators and art as emancipated, it is important to note that contemporary art and artists are also constantly and progressively evolving and adapting to their spectators’ need of freedom. Under those circumstances, the status of reality and fiction within the documentary genre has changed and stopped being the main concern. Instead, the importance of the impact of images on the spectator and how we can use images in ways that are different from history and media has become a priority. Mik shows that one of the ways in which it is possible to rethink the documentary approach is to permit the spectators to have access to an intellectual and physical space of free interpretation. In “Cardboard Walls,” Mik gives the possibility of this freedom through the absence of language but also through the arrangement of the space and the apparatus in which the work is presented.
The Exhibited Documentary – the Current State of Documentary
within Contemporary Art
Chapter III: ‘Crude Economy’ film program curated by Florian Wüst
for Impakt Festival, Utrecht, the Netherlands, November 2013
Introduction
In 2013, the Impakt Festival, which focuses on experimental art and new media and takes place in Utrecht, the Netherlands, invited the German curator Florian Wüst to come up with a film program inspired by the chosen theme of the edition, “Capitalism Catch 22.” Every year, the Impakt Organization chooses a theme for the festival that is in service of its goal to present critical and creative views on contemporary media culture and innovative audiovisual arts in an interdisciplinary context. The theme for the 2013 edition was chosen to explore the dilemmas that today’s society faces as a result of the capitalist economic system, especially following the economic crisis that started around 2008: “A choice between a rock and a hard place, or to make an analogy with the main character in Joseph Heller’s book of the same name, a real Catch-22.”27 From this collaboration between Florian Wüst and Impakt, “Crude Economy” was born: a film program divided into seven different film shows and screened for the duration of the festival at the ‘T Hoogt film theater and the Kikker theater. These shows consisted of films of different lengths, genres and from different time periods, and they focused on diverse aspects of the capitalist system and society, including economic freedom, financial trade and economic progress, as well as the risks and benefits of capitalism and its shifting effects on the human and natural environments. The significant amount of works in the program using a documentary approach, which was not the main focus, allows us to have an overview of the evolution of the genre within contemporary art and to predict its potential and its future. The collage that Wüst created by bringing together different works – from archival film to advertisements – within a film program makes it a peculiar experiment for the viewer. Similar to the one in Aernout Mik’s “Cardboard Walls,” the setting in which the films are presented questions the documentary practice within contemporary art and its relation to the viewer. “Crude Economy” also opens
